What made nine-year-old Jennet Devize accuse her  mother and siblings of witchcraft in 17th-century England?

Find out about the Pendle Witch trials  of 1612 on this episode of Footnoting History!

Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s  Kristin, back to kick off Spooky Season with a bit of witchcraft history from early  modern Europe.

Although, I’m gonna be honest, it’s always Spooky Season if you’re like me, so  if you’re listening to this on release day or not, doesn’t matter.

Welcome to the witch show, and in  this episode, we’re going to be focusing on one of the more curious cases – I think – to come out  of England during the height of the witch craze, and for England, its biggest witch incident.

I’m certainly not alone, historians love this one – and people at the time loved it too.

Or were  fascinated by it.

Or were scared to death of it.

Or all of the above.

Don’t forget that if you’d  like a captioned version of this episode you can find it on our YouTube channel or on our website –  and if you can’t get enough of the Pendle witches (and who really can?), you can find a bibliography  of Further Reading at Footnotinghistory.com I’m going to slightly change up the  order of how I usually do things by telling you the story of the Pendle witches  and then tell you about the source material, the “how we know what we know” segment  that Kristin is so fond of.

As are many of you – so don’t worry, we’ll  get to the sources, I promise.

The Pendle witch trials are also called the  Lancashire witch trials – and as things go, they’re pretty famous, most especially in  Lancashire where the castle where the witches were held still stands.

The well tower where they  were imprisoned still has iron rings on the walls where accused and convicted witches were shackled  and a lot of the surrounding landscape – roads and a pub – was there 1612 when it all went down.

And kind of like Salem, the town really leans into its witch history and there are witchy boutiques  and lots of merch and tours, some … better than others.

Just … FYI.

Lancashire is a county  in England, sort of in the north-western upper third of England, a bit above Wales, a  bit below Scotland – and Pendle sits inland, on the eastern end of the county.

It’s a stunning  area of rolling hills and woods and rivers, and take a Google Earth tour, it’s worth it just for  the atmosphere of the story I’m about to tell you.

So, it all began on March 21, 1612 when young  Alizon Devize came across a peddler named John Law.

Alizon’s last name is spelled variously in  the sources with a CE, a ZE, and an SE but her first name is always Alizon with Z.

John the  peddler was selling pins, Alizon demanded he give her one – it’s unclear if she wanted to pay  for it or not – and John refused for one reason or another.

And Alizon cursed him.

Immediately,  John fell down in a fit that was later described as caused by Alizon’s witchcraft and John (who  survived the attack) pressed charges with the local Justice of the Peace, a man named Roger  Nowell.

And thus began the legal proceedings.

The first people questioned were Alizon  and her mother, Elizabeth, and her brother, James.

John Law’s son, Abraham, was  also questioned.

In the arraignment, Abraham is described as assisting his  father, who could not stand on his own, in court.

Abraham said he got a letter from his  father, who was paralyzed on his left side (all but his eye) and who couldn’t speak.

Abraham  came and his father recovered enough to tell him that Alizon had pricked him with knives,  elsons (elson is a word for an awl – which is a little stabby tool for making holes in  leather), and she pricked him with sickles, and you know what a sickle is if you’ve ever seen  a drawing of the Grim Reaper, it’s that thing he’s carrying.

At least I hope you’ve only seen a  picture of him.

And it just went from there.

As these things so often went, interrogations led  to more people being named and being caught up in the drama and this case was no different.

Notably,  Alizon’s grandmother, also named Elizabeth but who was known around town as “Old Demdike,” was  questioned, as was their neighbor Anne Whittle, who was also known as “Chattox.” I know you’re  wondering what those nicknames mean.

I did too.

“Demdike” means “Demon-Woman” soooooooo.

Yeah, this goes to show you that Grandma had a pretty witchy reputation already.

That is  usually the case with these trials: people have an established reputation, sometimes going back  years, and when you see them in court, it’s not their first rodeo.

The nickname “Chattox” is a  little more unclear – it could be another word for “mumbler” or “chatterer” because this lady was  known for muttering to herself a lot or it could be a variation of the last name “Chadwick” but  she is described as always walking around talking to herself, so, if I had to guess, I’d guess  that one, but I really don’t know for certain.

Turns out that Chattox was in a family feud with  the Devizes, which is, again, kind of how these things often go.

Alizon confessed to being a  witch, she then accused her neighbors, who then turned the finger back to Demdike.

There ended up  being a lot of confessions which the sources label as “voluntarie” but how voluntary they really  were, I have my doubts.

Alizon, Demdike, Chattox, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne, were arrested and  sent to await trial in Lancaster Castle.

The trial would happen at the next meeting of the  Assizes, which were periodic legal proceedings that happened in the counties of England, and the  next one was scheduled for August of 1612.

The arrests were April 4.

So, they had months to wait.

They were not wealthy people and they could not afford to pay to improve their confinement or get  better food, so their stay was not a pleasant one.

According to the sources, a few days later, on  April 10, Elizabeth Devize – Alizon’s mother and Demdike’s daughter – made the interesting  decision to host a party, on Good Friday, in the family home which was called Malkin Tower.

Malkin Tower seems to no longer exist, I looked.

In some of the source material, it’s described  as being in the Pendle Forest – that’s all we really know but that sounds pretty on-brand for a  witch meet up spot to me, and it seems it sounded that way to people at the time too.

Maybe it was  a party, maybe it was just a gathering to debrief on the arrests, but it didn’t look good, and the  rumor was the witches were plotting to blow up the tower at the castle where their colleagues were  being held with gunpowder (and it’s 1612, it isn’t so very far away from the more famous Guy Fawkes’  Gunpowder Plot to blow up the parliament in 1605, that may be why gunpowder was one the mind).

Personally, I wonder why Elizabeth would want to help Chattox and her daughter, but that reasoning  is not explained.

People first heard about this Malkin meeting at the further questioning of  Elizabeth and then her other two children, Jennet and James, and they all talked about the Malkin  meeting and more names were added and the witch circle widened and even more people were arrested.

This was turning into a major witchcraft panic, more justices of the peace became involved and the  accusations were flying – and some of them were about things that had happened years earlier.

And  though Lancaster tends to get top billing, there were people in Salmesbury and arguably one woman  in York who were part of this witchcraft episode.

The trials happened on August 18 and 19, 1612 at  the Lancaster Assizes, as promised.

The guys in charge, the judges, were Sir Edward Bromley and  Sir James Altham.

Bromley was about 50 years old, and he was very active in the Elizabethan/Jacobean  legal scene, he worked at the Inns of Court, he also worked at the Exchequer, and he had a few  stints as an MP in Parliament.

Altham was about 10 years older and had a similar CV.

In July of 1612,  they were sitting at the Assizes of York – these towns are not very close to one another bt  it’s England, so nothing is that far away, and also that’s how assize courts worked, the  judges were itinerant and moved around.

In those York sessions, Bromley and Altham oversaw  the trial of a woman named Jennet Preston for witchcraft; so when they got to Lancaster  a few weeks later, they were ready to go.

On August 18, Elizabeth, her son James, Chattox  and Chattox’s daughter, Anne, were tried.

Where was Demdike, you ask?

Demdike died in prison which  was something that often happened, especially to the poor, who could not afford to pay for any sort  of quality confinement.

She was also pretty old, so that, unfortunately, is not that surprising  to witchcraft historians that she died in gaol.

Everyone but Anne was found guilty, but Anne,  was tried again on the next day.

(There’s no “no double jeopardy” here, people can be re-tried  after being found not guilty and then subsequently found guilty, and it happens – it’s shocking  especially for Americans to hear but that’s part of why that the Fifth Amendment was a big  deal.) On August 19, Anne, Alizon and several other people caught up in the panic were all tried  and found guilty.

There were 11 people in total, and 10 of them were executed.

One woman named  Margaret Pearson was convicted of non-capital witchcraft (meaning, she didn’t kill anyone with  her witchy-ness) and she was sentenced to being pilloried for 4 consecutive market days in 4  nearby towns (where she also had to make a full confession of her crimes) and to be imprisoned  for a year.

I could not tell you if she made it through all that, but it would surprise me  if she had.

Sounds like a year of hell to me.

The thing that is so exceptional about these  trials – apart from the scope and the many tragic outcomes – is that some of the evidence  that clinched the case was provided by a child: Jennet Devize, who was only about 9 years  old at the time.

According to a contemporary description of the trial written by a clerk  of the court, James Potts – and hang tight, we’ll come back to him in more  detail soon – according to Potts, during her examination by Nowel, the justice of  the peace, Elizabeth Devize – that “barbarous and inhumane monster” – wouldn’t confess a  thing (despite Nowel’s “very circumspect and exceeding carefull dealing” with her).

That is  “until it pleased G-d to raise up a young maid, Jennet Devise, her own daughter … (a witness  unexpected) to discover all their practices, meetings, consultations, murders, charms and  villanies.” That, combined with her other daughter Alizon’s testimony and her son James’  testimony against her did Elizabeth in and she starting singing.

I kind of suspect that Jennet  didn’t come forward on her own but whether that was divine intervention or if divine intervention  had a little help from the JP, or if Jennet had a really bad relationship with her family, who  can really say what made her come forward?

So, to answer the question posed at the outset of the  episode – what made Jennet Devize testify against her own mother?

My good little historians, you  already know the answer to that is we just don’t know for sure because Jennet never tells us  but we need to consider all the possibilities.

The whole thing sounds just really traumatic.

Jennet was brought into the courtroom and was told to give her evidence, against her mother,  who stood at the bar.

Elizabeth started crying and shouting – and “outrageously cursing”  – and Jennet started crying and she told the judges that she couldn’t speak in the  presence of her mother.

All of this sounds perfectly reasonable – if not super messed up –  to me.

Like of course that’s what would happen.

The description of the trial also found it  necessary to add in the very next paragraph that Elizabeth’s left eye sat lower than her  right, and that one eye looked up and the other looked down.

Potts calls her an “odious  witch … strangely deformed” and is all like, no one had ever seen anything like it.

And no  one could calm her down and get her to stop shouting and threatening Jennet and so they  had to take her out of the courtroom.

After which they stood Jennet up on a table  and had her tell them what she knew.

And she talks about how her witchy mom had  a demon visit her in the form of a brown dog named Ball – and Ball wanted mom to help him kill  a man named John Robinson of Barley – and her mom did it.

A few years later, Jennet said Elizabeth  called for Ball and asked him to help her kill James, John Robinson’s brother, and another  time, a guy named Mitton of Rough-Lee.

And Ball, according to Jennet, was like, I gotcha.

And both  these guys died 3 weeks after her mom put in the request.

Jennet also talked about that Good Friday  party at Malkin Tower – which happened at midnight and during which the witches feasted on beef,  bacon, and mutton – and how her mother taught her two prayers, one to cure the bewitched and one  to get a drink.

For purely informational purposes, I’d like to know what those prayers  were but we do not get details on them.

Jennet also testified against James.

James, it  seems, had a black demon dog named Dandy who did his dirty work.

And again, it was because  of “the wonderful work of G-d to raise up a young infant” to provide the evidence that  helped lead to a conviction and execution.

It was not normal for a child to provide evidence  in pre-modern English courts – or courts outside of England, for that matter.

It was highly unusual  – kids weren’t thought to give the most accurate information, especially little girls.

But this  is at a juncture in witchcraft history where extraordinary crimes called for extraordinary  measures – and this devilish conspiracy that stretched far and went back years – was just that  kind of situation for these Lancaster trials.

And here, friends, is where we talk about the  source material for the trials – that book published by James Potts, an associate clerk of  the Northern Circuit, who witnessed the Lancaster trials and who claimed he was asked to write  about them by the judges.

That book is “The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie  of Lancaster,” written in November of 1612 and published in 1613.

Because this book was written  by an eyewitness, relatively close in time to the events it describes, and because it contains a  lot of official court records – what happened in August but also depositions and confessions taken  earlier – people treated it as a faithful account of what happened here.

And it is and it isn’t.

Historian Marion Gibson talks about Potts’ “dusty memory” and explains how his account isn’t really  that straightforward.

Potts used formulaic legal documents to tell us what happened here but those  aren’t giving you what people actually said, they aren’t word-for-word, you miss a lot of details,  and he also adds in his own editorializing comments – like the thing about Elizabeth’s eyes  and calling people monsters and saying G-d was involved – and sometimes the order of how things  appear in his book wasn’t the order they happened in and the documents that are reproduced aren’t  necessarily how they were originally, which again, was an editorial choice.

It was meant to make  you think about these trials in a certain way.

When the assize judges came into town, they  got a list of people being held for trial and the indictments.

What Potts gives you  – with an official heading and dates, looks like a gaol delivery record, sorta, but  he’s only talking about these witches and not everyone else awaiting trial, so you just  get an edited version that maybe was what the judges got in August of 1612 or maybe was an  approximation from memory.

He does deliberately leave some things out.

If this were a trial like  other trials, convicted prisoners were allowed to make a statement before sentencing, to raise  any special mitigating circumstances that might grant them mercy.

Potts leaves this out – maybe  it didn’t happen in this case but if it didn’t, it would be unusual, and you’d think Potts  would explain its glaring absence.

Potts was an expert – so he is a very attractive source in  many ways: he’d been around in the system awhile, he was involved in the drafting of those formulaic  legal documents, he knew his way around the process, he’s not just some schmo sitting in  the back or hearing about it from Kevin down at the pub.

He likes to say things like “upon the  record” a lot and throw in Latin phrases, just so you don’t forget that he’s A Professional – and  Gibson argues that his publisher and printer maybe encouraged that but at the very least, probably  really liked that.

Discoverie was supposed to be a step up from the more common pamphlets that were  printed about witch trials in the 17th century.

There is also the consideration that Potts had  an agenda in the way he crafted Discoverie, and it wasn’t all about sales.

It was about  getting King James on board with the idea that there was an extensive satanic  conspiracy at work within England.

So, King James is pretty well known for being  an enthusiastic persecutor of witches, especially in Scotland where he was known as James  VI.

He wrote a whole book about it – Daemonologie, which was first printed in 1597 and it was  reprinted in London in 1603.

Very famously, King James thought witches tried to sabotage  his wedding to Anne of Denmark in 1589, and he personally attended the North Berwick witch  trials in Scotland shortly after in 1590.

There is a lot of Continental witchcraft theory in his  Daemonologie book, and Continental witchcraft theory is all about the satanic pacts and  conspiracies.

So, most people do tend to assume that James didn’t need further buttering up  to get him on board with witch trials in England,

but: England was not Scotland and it was not  Denmark, and people did tend to be a little bit more skeptical of witchcraft charges in  England.

And there is an idea that James maybe had a period of skepticism around the turn of the  17th century regarding witch stuff, and James felt that he personally uncovered fraud in several  witchcraft cases.

In the Lancaster case, people were convicted and executed based on the testimony  of a little girl, and there was a lot of unease about that, and 5 people who were caught up in the  larger, surrounding panic were later reprieved.

James opened an investigation into the “fraud”  and there were general grumblings about how judges were handling witchcraft cases, in Pendle and  elsewhere.

Stephen Pumfrey writes that this is speculative and we can’t know one way or the other  how skeptical James was overall about witchcraft at this time, and I do tend to agree with  that.

Moreover, the judges, Altham and Bromley, thought that Lancastershire was a backward place  filled with residual, superstitious-y activity that was thanks to Catholicism, and that hanging  “a coven of witches accused of making diabolic compact was a risky career move.” The phrasing  makes me chuckle but the point is totally serious.

[Another possibility to cut?] So, essentially  Altham and Bromley maybe commissioned Discoverie as a kind of public damage control – and maybe  the story of the Pendle witches in this book are how they Pendle witches really were, or the book  makes the Pendle witches conform to James’ vision of witchcraft from that Daemonologie book –  Continental European beliefs on how witches

worked: servants of Satan, Satanic worship and  pacts, diabolical Sabbath gatherings, “Malleus Maleficarum” witchcraft treatise 101 stuff, the  more “learned theories of witchcraft.” England had a different judicial system that required  someone to bring an accusation or a charge against someone (unlike inquisitorial procedure in most of  Continental Europe where judges could just do it), and you also had to convince a jury in England,  so witchcraft charges tend to follow more popular, folkloric ideas of what witches did, rather  than the top-down theories about Devil worship and apostacy and heresy.

Discoverie is the first  introduction of Continental ideas into England and it models itself off of Daemonologie, and  Pumfrey gives you a bunch of similarities of what the Pendles witches “did” according to  those judges and what James writes about.

Most interesting to me is that King James talks  about how essentially extraordinary crimes require extraordinary measures – witchcraft is often  talked about as a “crimen exceptum” in the sources and it’s kind of an “all bets are off, fight dirty  because every soul is in danger” sort of idea.

So yeah, you can have a child testify in court, you  can have a girl testify in court, that’s fine.

Before this, courts in England said you had to  be 14 or older to swear the proper oath in court (14 was the age of reason) but Jennet’s testimony  changed that in cases of accused witchcraft.

When you see child witches and child accusers, it’s  mostly in the 17th century when the accusations had peaked – and they probably also factored  into the decline of witchcraft accusations, too.

People were really uncomfortable with this,  and it struck them as particularly messed up.

What was it about the English counties of  Lancashire and Yorkshire that made for such fertile ground for a witchcraft outbreak  in 1612?

It’s kind of hard to say why any of these things happened because it’s  usually a mix of a lot of factors that sometimes take off and sometimes fizzle  out.

In this case, historians often look first to Lancaster and the trial of Jennet  Preseton, who I mentioned a bit earlier.

Her story is told in an appendix to Potts’  Discoverie, kind of as an afterthought to the whole Chattox-Demdike-Devize story.

In  this section with Jennet Preston’s story, Potts says that he’s writing in response to  Jennet’s supporters – her husband, her family, and her friends – who were outraged at how she  was treated at her first trial, and Potts is like “I’m going to explain why Jennet is actually  guilty and actually a witch” And he does explain.

It’s a pretty convoluted story of witchcraft and  murder and interesting relationships, but in that first trial, Preston was acquitted.

After the  acquittal, she allegedly went to Malkin Tower on that Good Friday and that’s her connection to  the Pendle witches and it’s James Devize who tells the authorities about it.

And this time Preston  is not so lucky about getting off.

Roger Nowell, knew the family that was allegedly affected by  Preston’s witchcraft and he’s the magistrate who questioned Alizon and Demdike and Chattox  and Elizabeth and James and then little Jennet.

Other historians have theories about what happened  in Pendle that revolve around the social and economic pressures of the area in the early 1600s.

Pendle’s economy was dependent on cattle and cloth and those were seeing a hit at this time and a  lot of accusations had to do with misfortunes that befell cows and milk production – and the  witches are described as goring on these things.

There were also a lot of religious tensions in the  area of Pendle – and historians often point out the tendency for witchcraft accusations to erupt  when Catholics and Protestants clashed.

Pendle was in Whalley Parish and it used to have an important  and large abbey before Henry VIII got to it – and when it was gone, there was a hit to the local  economy that Pendle still hadn’t recovered from in 1612.

Whalley Abbey had a residual influence  over the local populations and Catholic sentiments were still present in the early 17th century but  there were also a lot of Protestant reformers trying to stamp them out and that created a lot of  unease and social tension.

Roger Nowell was one of these reforming Protestants who really wanted  to destroy any vestiges of Catholic practice.

And there’s also the strong possibility that the  Pendle witches were practicing a type of local, folkloric magic.

There were a lot of cases in the  lower courts that had to do with what historians call “low” magic, regular people engaging in  charms and spells and things like that – that had nothing to do with a grand demonic conspiracy  or a pact with Satan – but was magical practice.

People just kind of did this – and sometimes it  was prosecuted in the courts and sometimes it wasn’t.

The Pendle witches probably were doing  it too – it just took on a different life once “learned,” Continental theories about Satanic  pacts and demonic worship were introduced.

As for Jennet, you’re probably wondering what  happened to her.

Again, I do and don’t have answers for you.

You don’t always get to follow  the end of the thread for characters you meet in historical sources, especially for young girls  and for women.

But Jennet, we do know something of what happened to her, and unfortunately, it’s not  good.

Jennet fell victim to the precedent she set and she was accused in 1633, along with 10 other  people, of witchcraft by a 10 or 11 year old boy, named Edmund Robinson.

He claimed that a woman  had taken him to a witches’ Sabbath where there were 60 people were making meat, butter, and milk  by pulling on ropes that were attached to the top of a barn.

His father suggested some people and  the boy agreed – yes!

those were the people!

19 people were convicted, one of whom was Jennet, who  was about 30 years old in 1633.

Doubts about the verdicts led the justices of the peace to request  an investigation by the Privy Council, the bishop of Chester was brought in, and the boy admitted  he made it all up and that his father’s suggested names were for “envy, revenge, and the hope of  gain” and that was the end of that trial.

You’d think that’d be a happy-ish ending for Jennet.

But  the last known record we have of Jennet is in 1636 – and she was still in gaol in Lancaster Castle  – she couldn’t leave until she paid for her room and board and for someone like Jennett, that was  probably impossible.

Pretty much nobody comes out good in this story – unless you count the clerk  and the judges and the publisher of Discoverie.

It was not uncommon, especially in England, for  witch trials to have a life outside the courtroom.

Printers were busy making leaflets or pamphlets  about the trials and they sold pretty well.

But, the Pendle story was incredibly popular, and  people wrote about it a lot and fictionalized it in print and on the stage, it was this  sensational thing that had a life of its own.

And Potts’ Discoverie made its way  over to the American colonies and it was one of the things the acting judges in Salem  were reading when they were trying to figure out how they should deal with their own  outbreak of witchcraft and child witnesses.

Thanks for staying spooky with me, Footnoting  History friends.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please be sure to like and subscribe to our  YouTube channel and follow us on social media.

Thank you to all our Patreon and Ko-Fi  supporters – if you’re not part of our Patreon, please consider helping us keep  Footnoting History open access by joining, or by making a one-time Ko-Fi donation,  or by purchasing some of our merch.

And until next time, remember, the  best stories are in the Footnotes.